Hacker News Reader

chuckadamson Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center

"No one could have predicted that permits and infrastructure necessary for this project's completion would be delayed". Except for every project that's needed permits and infrastructure ever.

I hope whoever buys Oracle fires Larry by email.

chuckadamson Data-only attacks are easier than you think (2024)

Taint analysis won't help against memory safety vulnerabilities that directly scribble over untainted data to make it malicious. You need something like a secure enclave to prevent that kind of tampering.

chuckadamson If you start writing today, there's no way to know if you can write without AI

"Claudish", that's a great term, a homophone of "cloddish (adj): foolish, awkward, or clumsy".

Deepseek 4.1 has (unsurprisingly) started speaking with a strong Claudish accent too, throwing around "honest" and "load-bearing" with abandon, and just generally obfuscating sentences with dense and unnatural phrasing. I'd give it a longer prompt in AGENTS.md regarding my preferred tone, but I don't care for wasting tokens adding an extra translation layer on all output (caveman mode costs tokens trying to chop everything down)

chuckadamson A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W

"Nuke-yoo-ler. It's pronounced nuke-yoo-ler."

Jimmy Carter pronounced it "Nook-ler". And he used to serve on a nookler submarine.

chuckadamson A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W

Plus it's still cumbersome to say. But I guess "sex-u" is right out.

chuckadamson Ask HN: Is it impossible to disable Siri on macOS 27?

I've been daily-driving a mac for 10 years now and I've only ever triggered Siri by accident. I do use it pretty regularly on the phone, mostly to set timers, get directions, and call contacts, but I've been well trained over these years to not expect it to be capable of more than that.

chuckadamson Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion

> DS 4.1 Flash, which is unguardrailed

Try asking it about Tianmen Square. I use DS myself, but let's not kid ourselves.

chuckadamson A warning about 'model welfare'

Another reason is that actual utopias make for pretty boring writing. Humanity convinced itself that they lived in a perfect world, but most of the writing was about the cracks in that facade. Even the preachy and awful first season of TNG had the character of Q demonstrating that we still had a long way to go.

chuckadamson English: A vs. An

Yes, unless Yoda you are.

chuckadamson English: A vs. An

Even more common with "the". "They are THE vendors", which is either to say that those are definitely the vendors referred to elsewhere, or that they represent the archetype of vendors (whatever that is). Language is weird.

chuckadamson Can we stop with the uptime percentages?

Not to mention being completely useless in the face of FaaS or just autoscaling.

chuckadamson A warning about 'model welfare'

And 20-odd years later, a terrorist attack prompts Starfleet to outlaw and eradicate his entire species.

chuckadamson Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils

JavaScript too, but only implemented in JavaScriptCore, so basically just Safari and Bun.

chuckadamson New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

I think I'm more likely to become a nun than blindly support anything from the current administration.

chuckadamson Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

Matt can flex his 84% voting power, but proxies can be clawed back, at which point he'll be left with 30% voting power (that being the fraction he owns outright). At worst, that is, since it would take a united front of shareholders and years of messy litigation. I think most investors would rather just cut their losses and sell their position.

chuckadamson Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted board ouster

> Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”

Uhhh, that's not normal... is it?

chuckadamson New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore

Jobs that Americans weren't getting because it was cheaper to hire an H1-B indentured servant instead. The current administration will no doubt find a way to make everything worse, but they didn't start with a good program to begin with.

chuckadamson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

> Is it a rule that everything starting with a 'z' must be cool?

They tend to be the last word on the subject :)

chuckadamson Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster

I should probably emphasize "supposedly": I get my facts from the same news rags as everyone, and I at least skim the court filings. Matt has held personal grudges against WPE's leadership for much longer than this most recent affair, so it almost certainly wasn't entirely Davies' idea, might not even have originated with him. But when the CFO discusses at length then signs off on such a novel revenue scheme, that makes him a co-conspirator at least. Barring a settlement, I imagine more details will come out in open court.

chuckadamson Matt Mullenweg tells Automattic staff in Slack he's back in control after ouster

Davies was supposedly the one who originally cooked up the whole extortion scheme against major players in the WP space. WPE was just the first target of many that were planned. Not that Matt is absolved in any way, but it'll be interesting to see what falls out if and when he throws Davies under the bus.

chuckadamson Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

The community was already starting to turn on Matt well before 2024. He's appointed himself release manager for every version of WP since 5.0 in 2018, which is how Gutenberg managed to land in core in such a half-baked state.

chuckadamson Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

The sandboxing requires CF workers though, as it depends on V8 isolates. Seems fair enough, but it'd be nice to see easily deployable cross-platform support someday for isolates or something similar, and not just for emdash.

chuckadamson Claude, change the "Add to Cart" button to blue

Not really my experience with Claude, and the prompts are not how I would phrase them, but still pretty damn funny: I especially loved the slot-machine-style picker for LLM-isms.

chuckadamson Antiquated HTML Snippets and Artefacts

I would imagine that “close enough” is a thing with ICBMs.

chuckadamson Recreating Minecraft Is Not a Benchmark

Mac here. There's nothing all that interesting going on with the JS on that page, so I would suspect a bug with Firefox and/or your desktop environment.

chuckadamson Recreating Minecraft Is Not a Benchmark

Running Firefox here, no problems whatsoever even with UBO and Privacy Badger disabled (the twitter embeds get blocked at the DNS level, but I doubt those are the problem).

chuckadamson Flock used >100 times to track veteran who recorded traffic stop

Ah, indeed that is the more likely reading. I stand by the boot bit.

chuckadamson Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns

One imagines when one puts up a publicly accessible mirror and adds it to the plugin's public mirror list, that they're cool with the public actually, yunno, using it.

Username certainly does check out.

chuckadamson Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

https://yellow5.com/pokey/archive/index312.html

MY LUNGS ARE ADAPTING! I'VE INHALED A ROAST

chuckadamson Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

> and in meat space

an odd place to be a hotbed of vegan advocacy.